This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz by Stuart Langridge. Original Post: Send a URL to your Ubuntu phone with Caxton Feed Title: as days pass by Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall Latest Web Buzz Posts Latest Web Buzz Posts by Stuart Langridge Latest Posts From as days pass by

I fairly often need to send a URL from my desktop to my phone; there has been a product called Chrome2phone (and Fox2phone) for Android for this for years, and there’s Ansible for iPhones. But not for an Ubuntu phone. At least until now.

Caxton does precisely that; you install the Caxton app on your Ubuntu phone and add the Caxton extension to Chrome or Firefox and then you can just click the button to send the URL you’re looking at in your desktop browser to your Ubuntu phone. Hooray!

but that’s not all

Caxton is quite a lot more general than that. You can use it to send any URL from anywhere to any app on your Ubuntu phone. For example, Caxton works with IFTTT. Do you want to get a notification on your phone when your package ships? Use IFTTT and make a recipe which gets alerts from your courier and sends a note to your phone. Need immediate alerts if your scripts fail? Add a line to your script which sends a message to the Caxton API on failure and you’ll never miss an alert again. And you don’t have to just send web URLs. If you’re an app developer on Ubuntu and you want your users to be able to send things from other devices or computers to your app, then you can have your app register for a custom URL and then have your users install Caxton; Caxton then handles all the push notifications stuff for you and your users get all the benefits of instant push while saving you the need to run a server.

cheers

I shall say thank you here to Alan Pope and Mike Sheldon for early testing, Marc Deslauriers for security and privacy advice, and Sam Hewitt for icon design. Speaking of privacy advice, Caxton is very careful to not explicitly store details of what you send through it, and it doesn’t know who you are; it also doesn’t keep a record of your tokens.

so let me know

If you find Caxton useful (or if you find it broken) do let me know on twitter or google+; I’d love to see people easily sending web pages over to their phone, and using the API to do cool things that I haven’t thought of!